


Sweet Is the Night-Air

by Vulgarweed



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M, Mating Rituals, Wings, flight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 10:22:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19810318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vulgarweed/pseuds/Vulgarweed
Summary: Free at last after the world didn't end, Aziraphale and Crowley take to the air for an ancient ritual. Unabashedly romantic and a little bit ridiculous, just like them.





	Sweet Is the Night-Air

“All still here,” Crowley said quietly.

“Mm,” Aziraphale said. It wasn’t a word, it was barely even a syllable, but a world of meaning lay in it.

Above the roar of the sea below them, Crowley heard the Bentley’s cooling engine making a tinking noise, as if assenting.

They stood on the edge of the white cliffs of Dover, watching the moonlight ripple in a breaking line over the gently churning sea. The late-summer air was warm and clear. The salty breeze lifted around them and ruffled the feathers they weren’t showing but could still feel.

“So little has changed,” Aziraphale mused. “And yet . . . so much.” He took a deep full-body breath and set his jaw. “Right, then. Crowley, my dear?”

“I’m right here,” Crowley said, trying not to boggle when he realized that Aziraphale was undressing. “What...are you doing?”

“I’m fond of this coat and shirt,” he said calmly and matter of factly, shrugging them off and carefully folding them, setting them down at long last in the tall grass. “Rather not rip them to shreds. You should do the same.” Crowley, hands trembling, obeyed. He gazed for a moment at the moonlight illuminating Aziraphale’s skin, the soft downy hairs of his chest, before losing his gaze in actual down as Aziraphale’s immense wings unfurled.

Crowley gave an involuntary little groan of pleasure as he too stripped to the waist and released his own long-restrained wings, felt the sea air on skin and feathers. He stretched out his lanky limbs and gave a little shiver of his spine as his pinions twitched eagerly. He returned to himself to see an odd formality in Aziraphale, a tremor in his outstretched hand.

“Fly with me?” Aziraphale asked. Crowley gasped just once when he truly understood what Aziraphale was asking. “Be not afraid.”

And lo, Crowley was not afraid. He nodded once and let his face grow soft as he accepted the invitation completely. He removed his dark glasses and laid them down on his folded jacket, turning his yellow eyes up to the moon.

They took to the air with a little leap of faith, knowing the rising sea winds would cradle them and lift them.

At first they soared apart to soak up the moonlight and cherish the sense of freedom, and then closer and closer in narrowing gyres, they drew together. Overlapping, chasing, leapfrogging. Crowley took a position just above Aziraphale to watch the muscles flexing between the shiny columns of outstretched feathers, and dipped his own wingtip against him daringly. They spun close enough to see each others’ ecstatic faces, and brushed together when they could in risky aerial caresses. Higher and higher they rose until the land was tiny below them and the lights of France were as bright as those of England.

When the air grew thin and cold, Aziraphale and Crowley flew at each other at high speed and clasped hands. With a reflex borne of ancient instinct, they drew in their wings and dropped. Stars spun around them. Vertigo stole their breath.

The velocity of their death-spiral winds blew tears from Crowley’s eyes. _The last time I fell, no one was holding me._

Aziraphale’s eyes shone as the moonlit sea shot up towards them, spinning. Their bodies arched and tensed and released in feral ecstasy as the thrill of the interlocked free-fall heated and blossomed into a deeper, sharper, all-infusing pleasure. He gazed at Crowley in absolute, unshakeable trust and a truly shocking intensity of desire.

Just short of the sea they unfurled their wings at full-stretch again and skimmed their feet through the crests of the waves as they leveled off to return to the cliffside, panting and elated.

In the tall grass, they came together in a slower, more earthly fashion, cocooned in their wings as they consummated again the ancient vow they had wordlessly made. They kissed and bit, tasted salt and sweat and ozone. They murmured praises but no promises - those had already been kept.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by eagle mating flights. [Here's a video someone set to "Skyfall"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M7loJ6uQqw). (Actual eagle sex is much less impressive. We can assume Aziraphale and Crowley did better than that.)
> 
> Title from [Dover Beach](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach) by Matthew Arnold. Ah love, let us be true to one another!


End file.
